Sunday, 28 October 2012

"Losing faith in gelignite we finally came round to the possibility of diving and Graham Balcombe's engineering skill produced a snorkel-like device from a cycle frame, raspberry valve and a garden hose. Water pressure on the chest prevented the diver reaching the necessary depth and wetsuits were then unknown and Graham Balcombe was removed from the water too cold even to speak. I had a go with the outfit but the engineering skill which had constructed it failed to ensure that the garden hose remained attached, and I also had to be removed from the water, wet inside and out."

Jack Sheppard helping to invent cave diving in 1934. Thats the kind of thinking that has got this country where it is today.

Thursday, 25 October 2012

Teens are back and the tables have turned. Boyd Of The Rope is no longer a man mountain with a strength of 18 but a tired toothless middle-aged man, desperately clutching the Birdhouse that now contains his soul.A massive battle using Zak S's Moshpit Rules and the Dungeon Dozens Army Of Evil tables saw the teens facing an epic force of evil plant-based necromancers with only friendly Lizardmen, a detachment of Predator Drones from the future, a Gorgon, pick-wielding man-ape shock troopers and Evil Fake Luke Skywalker.

Result 7 on the Heavy Infantry table is a 'Hard-bitten division of armoured simulacra of famous champions of good'. So I let them name the hero's. We got:-

Ash Ketchum. (Punched to death before deploying his first Pokemon. Generally considered by all present to be secretly evil as 'he never ages, he's been on missions that take 13 years and he still says "I'm twelve".' Table opinion was that Ash hangs around with a lot of new people as he is secretly disposing of them to conceal his freakishly aged body.)Mario. (Cause of death unclear. Either tried to jump on someone in the battle and got skewered, or tried to eat a bad mushroom and exploded. Not enough time for anyone to check.)Commander Shepherd. (Survived. I think.)And perhaps one or two other Amine characters I'm not familiar with.Teen3 ably prevented a FLAILSNAIL incursion by pointing out that 'I've got a telepathic snail right here.' Teen's high charisma and snail-based psionics enabled him to subvert the FLAILSNAIL'S loyalty. Same teen still takes 5 minutes of furrowed brow when I ask him 'how to you hide?' when he wants to use stealth.Battle ended with the Teens taking down an evil* Zoimancer that Teen 1 had previously tricked into becoming a Minotaur, thereby making him more dangerous, while an evil Liche with recently stolen eyes sat on his new Flailsnail and laughed.Success resulted in no magic items, but a field promotion for Teen2, who was randomly assigned command at the start of the battle, now making him a 'Major General'. Which proved useful when the others laughed at his Halloween costume for possibly containing a skirt.*Though the word really has no relative meaning in the campaign.

Wednesday, 24 October 2012

I've been watching the NHK 70's doumentary series on the Silk Road. Pretty much every episode has tonnes of GameFuel but episode four, 'The Dark Castle' is almost a D&D module in documentary format.

We have-

-An ancient ruin whose name translates directly as 'dark castle'.-Local peasants who warn the film crew not to go there as 'bad things happened there'-An old Mongol guide who takes them, but refuses to go inside.-And won't approach at night.-And sings an ancient tribal song of the castles doom. -The keep itself, a ruin the size of a small town.-A freaky blair-wich camera shot when the 'Dark Castle' first appears over the dunes. -Collapsed temples, preserved by the desiccating wind from the gobi dessert.- A last king. The Super-strong Buddhist named 'Batir' known as 'The Black General' and his unbeaten army.- Batirs treasure, 80 cartloads of gold and silver.- His war with, besiegement by and death at the hands of... GHENGIS KHAN.- Batir killed his family and hid his treasure before his death. Treasure has never been found.- 2000 year old silk fragments, a collapsed column disgorging ancient tokens for the dead, a single building standing alone outside the castle walls (the Mosque) and some handy PR for the Peoples Republic if China (they launch missiles!)If you have an hour free...

Tuesday, 23 October 2012

Sea monsters prevented Alexander
from building Alexandria. He took a wooden container in which a glass
box was inserted, and dived it to the bottom of the sea. There he
drew pictures of the devilish monsters he saw. He then had metal
effigies of these animals made and set them up opposite the place
where building was going on. When the monsters came out and saw the
effigies, they fled. Alexander was thus able to complete the building
of Alexadria.

It is a long story made up of
nonsensical elements which are absurd for various reasons
...'(Khaldun lists some reasons)'... Furthermore, the jinn are not
known to have specific forms and effigies. They are able to take
on various forms …. All this throws suspicion upon the story.'

HOW
FAR UNDERGROUND CAN YOU GET ON MEDIEVAL LIGHT TECHNOLOGY? - comments
appreciated on this one.

Currently
looks like you can get down to a certain depth on secular/sensible
light tech. Then in the bottom reaches civilisations would grow
around exploitable light sources. Bioluminescene, whale oil from
albino whales in the hidden oceans, lava conduits? But the long dark
reaches in-between would be wilderness, can only adventure there with
magic light or exotic sources.

Fluorescence,
Phosphorescence, Bioluminescence, and Chemiluminescence all a bit
different.

Aim
to have a clear page plan by Christmas.

How
the fuck does Infravision work. Infra-red of what? How does
darkvision work?

Need
some way of working out light per kilo/pound for illuminating
materials. Hight LPH = survival value.

How
quickly do you hallucinate underground and how much and what of?

TIME
– A sliding scale as the human time sense changes underground.

The
dangers are many and constant. The rewards should be few but mighty.
Not only material but aesthetic.

Book
to be arranged from the centre
out. The centre pages that fall open naturall and stay open most
easily should be those the DM needs RIGHT NOW. Moving outwards from
the centre pages should be those which the DM needs most frequently
and the tools which can be learnt most quickly. As we move towards
the front and back covers we find the pages which are used less
frequently or which require more time to use effectively.
Book-as-tool. Is this a clever/stupid idea?

Climbing
is a remarkable thing and intelligent climbing twice remarkable.

Have
knots drawn on page, if fighting while hanging on, player must place
pencil on page and trace pattern continuously while throwing dice,
without removing pencil from paper or going over line. Clever/stupid?

The
most vital parts of underdark travel are the least interesting parts
of the game. Encumbrance and slowness. Need to energise choices.

Caves
isolate
individuals. Tactical scale game will usually be about using
innovative thinking to overcome separating effect of the environment?
>Take Risks To Work Together<

An
underground silk-road with the oasis being eruptions of wild
environments, each inhabited by different extremophiles. For them
these are distant trading posts. Extremophile Treasure Chemistry?
Treasures from impossible environments?

Vornheim
has tools for generating different scales
of action. City plan, street plan, building plan. Start with the
smallest and work up
in scale and down
in depth. Scale and volume

Cavers
remove the cardboard tubes from toilet rolls to reduce weight.
Lightness is a powerful value multiplier underground. Drow swords
would have a much of the blade removed a possible, like bike riders
who drill holes in the frame to remove mass.

Friday, 19 October 2012

This blog has never been popular enough for me to actually give a shit about how I moderate it, but at this point I should make my policy explicit. How will I deal with all the complex human interaction that comes with hosting a blog?Like Stalin on Cocaine.So, if you are asking yourself 'hey, I'm not sure if this is appropriate, maybe this isn't the kind of thing this blog is about, maybe I'm crossing some sort of line'All you need to do is imagine saying the same thing in front of Stalin when he's coked up. What does Stalin think of your comment?YOU HAVE NO IDEA BECAUSE HE IS AN INSANE DICTATOR WHO WILL KILL YOUR FAMILY AND ERASE YOU FROM HISTORY. FOR NO REASON.Understand if you come on here you are entering the sphere of a paranoid, resentful, fearful, angry lunatic who will react to any perceived or imagined or suggested slight with rapid and excessive force, or not, and will then deny the whole thing, even to himself.

Tuesday, 16 October 2012

The rest of this post is just zero-creativity rip of quotes from the same thing for people who don't have the time to read it. You should thank Discover Magazine, not me.

"And it had genes for chemoreception, which tells us it’s sensing
something ....it
has the capability of moving around. The idea that organisms down there
might be moving around and interacting with the environment—that was
really surprising. The only tip-off from the genome that this is a
subsurface organism is that it has no protection against oxygen. As soon
as it hits air, it’s dead."

"Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator is entirely
self-sufficient. It has its energy source, radiation..... Such things aren’t supposed to exist."

Feeding on radiation in the lightless depths, good, goooood.

"There may exist a shadow biology—very, very primitive organisms that may
have come into existence very early on our planet but were completely
replaced by DNA organisms everywhere else."

"The mine has a helical tunnel that goes a kilometer and a half down. All
this warm air comes up from below, and as soon as it hits the
permafrost layer, where the ground is permanently frozen, all the
moisture in the air crystallizes and you get huge snowflakes, a couple
of feet wide"

"The more I learn, the more it seems that the requirements for life are
pretty minimal. The niches that life can occupy never cease to amaze me.
A place may look terrible to us, but to something else, that’s their
Eden."

There is also this:- "Subsurface biota extends over a wide variety of habitats that can be spatially interconnected." (Click image for link)

Friday, 12 October 2012

The
first way makes use of a circle of friends. You need to think of all
the people you know who you could possibly call for help. Imagine the
qualities and personalities of everyone close to you. Find the person
whose nature makes them best suited to the task. Then call them and
ask.

The
second way involves calling a professional. Firstly, classify the
task by its nature. Discover a profession that deals with the problem
you have. Call an effective member of that profession. Prepare to
make a transaction.

I
think about gods like this. One one side rank the gods described by
Homer and on the other stand the gods of Rome and the made-up gods of
D&D.

Homer*
does not describe gods of war or gods of love or of wisdom or of any
other thing. He names them by what they do
and how they act, not
by their fucking job description. The necessary repetitive poetics
of an orally-concieved story do not describe Athena as 'Goddess of
Wisdom'. They call her grey-eyed Athena, or bright-eyed Athena,
depending on how you translate it.

Homer
gives us gods as people first, positions second. Athena does not
represent calm,
order, cunning, civilisation or craft. These qualities she has,
calm, ordered, cunning, civilised and crafty.

Over
the Greek period the gods decay somewhat. Polybius writes of the rise
of Rome. He talks about Tyche in different ways. Later translators
find themselves confused by his views on the role of fortune.
Polybius does not recognise their confusion. He writes about a person
and about a force. Tyche does the things that a person does.
Sometimes present, sometimes not. This makes for bad and ill-defined
history. But more truth.

By
the Roman period the gods have been fully subdued to human will. No
longer a separate self-contradictory relationship outside ourselves
that we must struggle to understand. Ares, the thug and a terrifying
violent killer to whom few prayed. The Romans made him Mars, potent,
stable, and a firm defender of the state. No longer a gleeful
anarchic Hobbsian.

The
gods have jobs and roles. The job before the person every time. Like
the second example above, they become plumbers we call when we need
something done. Chained by the thoughts that called them to our mind.
Mars cannot do certain things because they don't fit the role. But
Ares has nothing he cannot do. He has no role to fill, Ares exists.

This
describes why my insane made-up god who alternately hunts and flees
through mazes eating ghosts and being chased by them cannot be called
the god of mazes. I
named ManPac 'Eater Of Ghosts' or 'He Who Flees'. His commands and
prescriptions will never make clear rational sense. Because he
embodies as a huge yellow ball of hunger fear and rage charging
through an endless labyrinth, which, when escaped from, exits into
another, more difficult labyrinth.

But
they will be just on the edge of making sense, like an optical
illusion just before it resolves, I will try to keep him just there,
like the gods of Homer. Something larger, outside ourselves.

I
pilot a person I created, who believes fervently in a supernatural
being that I also created, in a world I did not create. Occasionally
the supernatural being gives insane random answers to the person, who
then has to make sense of them. I have to make sense of them both.
For some reason this interests me.

*I
describe the following theory from memory only and hold firmly and
glum-handed the likelihood that I lock myself in utter wrongness.

Wednesday, 10 October 2012

I
played someone more stupid than me in a game before he died. It took
hard work and I enjoyed it.

Damodar
worked on a slik farm and escaped to become an adventurer. He had
intelligence of seven and wisdom of six. I like to think of my
intelligence as twelve or thirteen, but apparently everyone does this
so it's more likely I have an INT of ten, or, possibly eleven.

He
didn't look like this, but this is how he would have thought of
himself:-

Every
time Damodar had a problem I had to think about how to solve it. I
could never solve his problems like I solve my own. If I did things
he couldn't do then the character wouldn't work.

We
have lots of ways to think about someone less capable than ourselves.
People like to talk and argue about this a lot. Very few of those
ways involve you creating those people from random numbers and parts
of yourself and then taking responsibility for both their survival
and the integrity of thier personality. Except posibly becoming a
parent.

I
knew when bad things happened and Damodar didn't. I knew when people
lied to him and he did not. I did not find it frustrating, but
powerful and energising, my mind worked constantly. I had to protect
him with the only tools I had. The ones inside his character.

He
asked a LOT of direct questions, because he didn't know much. (I
never do this, I remain silent.) People usually answered because he
seemed obviously stupid and innocent. He happily accepted the social
superiority of his co-adventurers. (You won't see me do this.) That
made them happy and made him popular. I interpreted his low WIS as
courage so he became impetuous.

I
found him nicer than me. And a better human than most of my
characters. And probably a better person than me. Perhaps that only
happened because of the action, inside my mind, of protecting him.

Damodar
died defending his friends. My next character rolled up as an angry
eunach. I put most of my creative energy into his insane
god.

In
Dogs In The Vinyard I play a highly intelligent, fundementalist
teenage girl.

With Basemeth most of the creative tension comes from
her 19th century pseudo-christian morality and my 21st
century vague liberalism. Again we must solve problems together. She
thinks faster and deeper than I can. I have more time to think of her
responses so she acts in the upper range of my own capabilities. But
we have different perspectives on the world.

Like
the same scene viewed from different points, we share only certain
ground. When events moves out of this ground one of us will become
upset. Since we live in the same person, this ruins things for both
of us. But if I let her collapse into a sock-puppet for my own values
then she dies. So we must work together on remaining creatively
different.

Every
character I play feels like a powerful living exchange between me and
this created thing. A waterfall looping like a lemniscate
through dual poles. I never know which parts of me will surface and
crystalize. Like meeting a new person every time.

Saturday, 6 October 2012

Matthew White wrote a book about the one hundred deadliest things done in human history.

(I was quietly relieved because the British Empire only had two places in the top ten.)

Because he draws a world history with regard only to recorded deadliness the picture you get is truly global. An image of the species at it's worst.

Below are the parts I found myself underlining when I read them, in general chronological order, shorn of context. They make a kind of negative-image palimpset of the ascent of man.

'You
would be hard pressed to find a nation less suited to peaceful first
contact with an alien culture than Renaissance Spain.'

'A
long history of international law prohibiting the murder of civilians
hasn't actually prevented the murder of civilians, but has made us
quite good at coming up with excuses.'

'He
was a devout, cross-dressing Catholic who sometimes showed up at
official functions in drag. Henry had an entourage of handsome young
men called his Darlings (Mignons). He collected little dogs and hid
from thunderstorms in the cellar. Catherine unsuccessfully tried to
tempt Henry into heterosexuality by offering him naked serving girls
at special parties she arranged for his amusement, but that didn't
work.'

'Somewhere
out in the middle of nowhere, a long time ago, the Chinese wiped out
a tribe few people have heard of. Most of history is like this.'

'The
one thing everyone should know about the Crimean war is the
mind-boggling incompetence displayed by everyone involved.'

'To
make matters worse, as their negotiator, the Russians sent a man who
absolutely detested the Turks ever since a Turkish cannonball
castrated him in an earlier Russo-Turkish War.'

'From
here on out, every new war had to figured out from scratch, usually
after the first wave sent into battle had been torn apart.'

'...some
of the best stories you hear about Lopez's self-destructive insanity
were merely propaganda spread by his Brazilian and Argentine enemies.
His story gets less interesting the more you look at it. (Damm you,
research!)'

'As
a purely practical matter, the number of British dead on the first
day of the Somme accounted for maybe 1,400 tons of rotting tissue and
bone littering the battlefield.'

'Peter
Pan was shot through the head in Flanders.
That's the war in a nutshell.'

'Faced
with a crumbling nation, Lenin's answer to all his problems was to
shoot someone.'

'The
average Chinese citizen still paid the same taxes, bribes and
protection money to the same local officials for the same lack of
services, just as he had always done.'

'The
army was going to do whatever was necessary to enhance the glory of
the emperor, with or without permission.'

'By
the time the missing soldier returned from his visit to the local
brothel and asked what the fuss was about. Japanese intelligence had
spotted nationalist Chinese troops heading for the border.'

'...it's
worth noting that Trotsky's behaviour during the Russian Civil War
showed that he wasn't exactly Mr Cuddly either.'

'He
was sent to a Jesuit seminary but expelled for reasons that remain
something of a mystery. Speculation abounds, but none of it has been
proved, so lets just say he was expelled for being Stalin.'

'The
land is the place where the prize is kept, not the prize itself.'

'American
conservative who have no problem listing Mao as one of history's
greatest monsters go strangely silent on the matter of Confederates.
Leftists who would never wear a Confederate flag on their cap gladly
emblazon quotes from Chairman Mao on their T-Shirts.'

'A
friend once wondered aloud how much suffering in history has been
caused by religious fanaticism, and I was able to confidentially tell
her, ten per cent..'

'If
you want philosophy, it's two shelves over that way.'

'In
fact, it's hard to blame the First World War on anything in
particular because we're still not sure what it was all about.'

Wednesday, 3 October 2012

However,
if you work directly for an evil Liche who has laughingly boasted of
cheating death and if your twitchy and terrified manservant can drag your ruined corpse to the Liche's tower, then you can do this:-

FIRST
– You wake up with your own eyes looking at you. Passirk has taken
them. He liked the look of them.

SECOND
– You now live in someone else’s body. You can keep your
memories, personality, XP, class levels and skill points. BUT..

THIRD
- Re-roll everything else. ALL stats and Hit Points*. AND..

FOURTH
– Gender. Roll a dice. Odds male, evens female. Unless you find
that gender essentialist, in which case do it the other way. round.

FIFTH
– Your are now 10+ 5d20 years old.

SIXTH
– Something has gone a bit weird with this body. Roll on this
table to find out what.

SEVENTH
– your soul is now a random object, the first thing Passarisk
pulled off the shelf. If you lose it, you die. If you break it, you
die. If it gets damaged, it will damage your stats. This utterly
normal object gives no magical benefit in any way. It never shows up
as magical to any examination.

*'But
what about intelligence and wisdom and even dexterity being functions of
thought and training as much as'.... blahblahblah all or nothing,
live or die CHOOSE.

Tuesday, 2 October 2012

This is in answer to a comment in the last post by mattgusta. It consists mainly of links and rambling, only tangentally about RPG's

"What's your interest in E-Prime?"

Well..
the idea grew in a series of connections.

I
found an article on E-Prime via a tumblr called Daily
Idioms, Annotated. (Which you should avoid if you fear
procrastination.) That linked up with something I read a while ago
and blogged about here.
(The last half in particular about the lack of use of 'is' in greek
drama, and everything from there to 'ceaseless flow'.

I
suspect all that stuff hid inside my mind because I have a few
half-finished projects scattered around written in iambic pentameter.
One a play, the other, a choose-your-own-adventure story for
smartphones with each choice a block of verse. Writing those made me
obsessed with something, something to do with describing the world as
a series of relations between living things always acting on each
other, presenting choices as dynamic living options. That vague but
powerful feeling leapt into one kind of form when I read Havelocks
book on literacy and changed again when I read about E-Prime.

It
seemed interesting, that I might learn something from doing it. It
might make me focus more on my writing, become more direct, less
fuzzy.
Sometimes just focusing on a kind of grammatical or rhythmic
challenge can change the way you write. Even if the challenge has
little importance in itself, it gives the left-brain something to
worry about and lets the rest of you loose.

Veins of the Earth Hardcopy

‘They've knocked it out of the park. Hit it for six. Got it in an arm bar in the first round. Pick your sport, pick your metaphor, doesn’t matter: the point is clear – so soon after _Fire on the Velvet Horizon_, Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess prove once again that something as unlikely as an RPG supplement can be art, of the most impressive kind. An amazing work.’ - China Mieville

FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON

"Superpositioning with strange panache, Velvet Horizon is an (outstanding) indie role-playing-game supplement, and an (outstanding) example of experimental quasi-/meta-/sur-/kata-fiction. Also a work of art. Easily one of my standout books of 2015." - China Mieville" Maybe my favourite thing we've made. If you like Scraps work click the pic.